Digital Outdoor Play: Benefits and Risks from an Interaction Design Perspective Tom Hitron Idan David Netta Ofer The Interdisciplinary Center The Interdisciplinary Center The Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya, Israel Herzliya, Israel Herzliya, Israel
[email protected] [email protected] [email protected] Andrey Grishko Iddo Yehoshua Wald Hadas Erel The Interdisciplinary Center The Interdisciplinary Center The Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya, Israel Herzliya, Israel Herzliya, Israel
[email protected] [email protected] [email protected] Oren Zuckerman The Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya, Israel
[email protected] ABSTRACT Author Keywords Outdoor play has been proven to be beneficial for children’s Outdoor Play; Head Up Games; Transparent Technology; development. HCI research on Heads-Up Games suggests Interaction Design. that the well-known decline in outdoor play can be addressed by adding technology to such activities. However, outdoor play benefits such as social interaction, creative thinking, and INTRODUCTION physical activity may be compromised when digital features Outdoor play is known to positively influence children’s devel- are added. We present the design & implementation of a novel opment [1]. Three important benefits of outdoor play are so- digitally-enhanced outdoor-play prototype. Our evaluation cial interaction, creative thinking, and physical activity [9, 12]. with 48 children revealed that a non-digital version of the By playing outdoors in groups or teams, children engage in novel outdoor play object afforded social play and game in- social interaction both by competing and collaborating, de- vention. Evaluation of the digitally-enhanced version showed veloping empathy, and increasing their social competence reduced collaborative social interaction and reduced creative accordingly [1,9,18, 24, 31, 39].